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Last active October 29, 2025 15:13
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2024 reading list
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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

Now extended into 2025.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard (translator) - The Little Prince
  • (Translation by) Sam Hamill - Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems From the Chinese
  • Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator) - Convenience Store Woman (via)
  • Jorge Luis Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (in Labyrinths)/ printed (via)
  • Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis (via)
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand/ audio (via)
  • Peter D. Kaufman - Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
  • Lia A. DiBello - Expertise in Business: Evolving with a Changing World (in The Oxford Handbook of Expertise) (via)
  • Joël Glenn Brenner - The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
  • Elad Gil - High Growth Handbook/ audio
  • W. Edwards Deming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Deming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ the PDF or ebook
  • Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland/ including the posts I SingleFile'd
  • the relevant-looking posts on benkuhn.net/posts
  • Commoncog Case Library Beta
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board/ audio
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The 4-Day MBA/ video
  • Cedric Chin's summary of 7 Powers
  • Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura - Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony
  • Nomad Investment Partnership Letters or redacted (via)
  • How to Lose Money in Derivatives: Examples From Hedge Funds and Bank Trading Departments
  • Brian Hayes - Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
  • Accelerated Expertise (via)/ printed, "read Chapters 9-13 and skim everything else"
  • David J. Gerber - The Inventor's Dilemma (via Oxide and Friends)
  • Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • Rich Cohen - The Fish That Ate The Whale (via)
  • Bob Caspe - Entrepreneurial Action/ printed, skim for anything I don't know

Interactive fiction

unplanned notable things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga - The Courage to Be Disliked/ audio
  • Matt Dinniman - Dungeon Crawler Carl/ audio
  • Charles Eisenstein - The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible/ audio
  • Geoff Smart - Who: The A Method for Hiring/ audio
  • Genki Kawamura - If Cats Disappeared from the World/ audio
  • Paul Stamets - Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet/ audio
  • Jefferson Fisher - The Next Conversation/ audio
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ivan commented Oct 1, 2025

On a semi-related note, one cool prompting technique is to act like part of the prompt has been cut-off and have the prompt begin with something like:
“(cont'd)
In summation, your task is as follows ...”
or
“[MISSING DATA]
To recap everything we have discussed so far, ...”

That way the model treats the prompt as if a much more detailed set of instructions must have come before it.

https://x.com/LokiJulianus/status/1973129252204626112

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ivan commented Oct 3, 2025 •
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After migrating a decent amount of their statements to var, they saw an 8% performance improvement across some benchmarks.

https://vincentrolfs.dev/blog/ts-var

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ivan commented Oct 5, 2025

Well, Postgres integer primary keys are signed. So there's this WHOLE other half of the 32-bit word that you're not using if you're just auto-incrementing keys. My simple (read stupid) solution, which absolutely worked was to set the sequence on that primary key to -2,147,483,648 and let it continue to auto-increment, taking up the other half of that integer space. It was so dumb that I think we met like three times together with SRE to say things like, "Is it really this simple? Is this really likely to work? Are we really doing something this dumb?" and the conclusion was yes, and that it would buy us up to 3 years of time to migrate, but we would do it within 6-8 months so all IT departments can make alternative arrangements for their API integrations.

https://jeffersonheard.ghost.io/the-best-worst-hack-that-saved-our-bacon/

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ivan commented Oct 25, 2025

What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.

I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45700568

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ivan commented Oct 25, 2025

The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45700568

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ivan commented Oct 29, 2025

Our older son seems to have picked up some conversation habits from me. He's playing some online multiplayer game with voice chat, and he's politely asking his teammates stuff like "what things were you thinking about when you did [stupid decision]" in a friendly voice

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1983032568405782886

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